ABSTRACT
Henry Boies’s book Prisoners and Paupers shows how easily degeneration theory and criminal anthropology flowed into demands for eugenic responses to crime. Boies, a member of Pennsylvania’s Board of Public Charities, was also on the state’s Lunacy Commission and active in prison reform on both the state and national levels. What distinguished him from other social reformers of his day were his books – Prisoners and Paupers, from which I extract here, and Diseases of Society (1901) – and the vigor with which he demanded eugenic measures.
